Charles Snow - The New Men

‘I didn’t expect this,’ said Martin.

‘Didn’t you? You must have been working things out,’ said Bevill.

I thought once more, that in such matters he was no man’s fool.

He continued: ‘Now you can forget everything that I’ve told you. But a nod’s as good as a wink to a blind horse.’

Few men who have longed for success can have known the exact minute when it came; but Martin must have known it, sitting at the side of the baking hearth at Pratt’s, with the old man lifting his glass of port, and someone from the foot of the staircase calling out ‘Tommy’, so that Bevill, flushed, still businesslike, said to Martin, ‘That’s tipped you the wink,’ and turned his head and began talking loudly to his acquaintance at the door.

I looked at Martin, leaning back while Bevill talked across him. One side of his face was tinged by the fire: his mouth was tucked in, in a sarcastic smile: his eyes were lit up.

I wished that the party would stretch on. Anyway, why should I ask him anything? It was not like me, or him either, to speak for the sake of speaking; as soon as one admitted out loud a break in the human relation, one made it wider.

I went on drinking, joining in Bevill’s reminiscences of how he saved Barford years before. I told a story of my own which exaggerated Martin’s influence and judgement at that time, giving him credit for remarks which Francis Getliffe made, or that I had made myself.

At last the old man said: ‘Time for bye-byes!’ We helped him up the stairs, found him a taxi, received triumphant goodbyes, and watched as the rear lamp climbed the slope of St James’s Street up to Piccadilly. Martin and I exchanged a smile, and I said something to the effect that the old man’s ancestors must have gone up this street many times, often drunker than that.

‘Occasionally soberer,’ said Martin.

We looked across the road, where the lights of Boodle’s shone on to the moist pavement. After the room we had left, the humid night was sweet. We stood together, and I thought for an instant that Martin expected me to speak.

‘Well, then, good night,’ he said, and began walking down the street towards the palace. He was staying in Chelsea; I hesitated, before turning in the opposite direction, on my way north of the park.

Martin had gone ten paces along the pavement. I called out: ‘No, I want a word with you.’

He turned, not jerkily, and walked with slow steps back. He did not pretend to be puzzled, but said, with an expression open, concerned, as intimate as in the past: ‘Don’t you think it would be better not to?’

‘It’s too late for that.’

‘I am sure that we shall both regret it.’

Mechanically, for no reason, we dawdled side by side along the pavement, while I waited to reply. We had gone past Brooks’ before I said: ‘I can’t help it.’

It was true, though neither of us at that moment could have defined what drove us on. Yes, I was half sad because of what he had done; but there was hypocrisy in the sadness. In warm blood, listening to Bevill, I should not have repined because a brother had stamped down his finer feelings and done himself well out of it. Success did not come often enough to those one was fond of that one’s responses could be so delicate.

It would have been pleasant to have been walking that night as allies, with his name made.

We were further from allies than we had ever been. I was bitter, the bitterness was too strong for me. As we walked by the club windows I could think of nothing else.

Nevertheless, the habits of the human bond stayed deeper than the words one spoke. I was not attempting — as I had attempted on New Year’s Day — to end the difference between us. Yet the habit endured, and as I said ‘I can’t help it’ under the St James’s Street lights, I had a flash of realization that I was still longing for his success even then. And, looking into his face, less closed that it had been for months, I realized with the same certainty that he was still longing for my approval even then .

‘I think you ought to leave it alone, now,’ I said.

‘How?’

‘You ought to have nothing more to do with the Sawbridge affair.’

‘I can’t do that,’ said Martin.

‘It’s given you all you expected from it.’

‘What did I expect from it?’

‘Credit,’ I said.

‘You think that’s all?’

‘You would never have done it if you hadn’t seen your chance.’

‘That may be true.’ He was trying to be reasonable, to postpone the quarrel. ‘But I think I should also say that I can see the logic of the situation, which others won’t recognize. Including you.’

‘I distrust seeing the logic of the situation,’ I said, ‘when it’s very much to your own advantage.’

‘Are you in a position to speak?’

‘I’ve done bad things,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think I could have done some of the things you’ve done.’

We were still speaking reasonably. I accepted the ‘logic of the situation’ about Sawbridge, I said. I asked a question to which I knew the answer: ‘I take it the damage he’s done is smaller than outsiders will believe?’

‘Much smaller,’ said Martin.

Led on by his moderation, I repeated: ‘I think you should leave it alone now?’

‘I don’t agree,’ said Martin.

‘It can only do you harm.’

‘What kind of harm?’

‘You can’t harden yourself by an act of will, and you’ll suffer for it.’

On the instant, Martin’s control broke down. He cried out: ‘ You say that to me?’

Not even in childhood, perhaps because I was so much the older, had we let our tempers loose at each other. They were of the same kind, submerged, suppressed; we could not quarrel pleasurably with anyone, let alone with one another. In the disagreement which had cut us apart, we had not said a hard word. For us both, we knew what a quarrel cost. Now we were in it.

I brought out my sharpest accusation. Climbing on the Sawbridge case was bad enough — but climbing at Luke’s expense, foreseeing the mistake that Luke’s generous impulse led him into, taking tactical advantage both of that mistake and his illness — I might have done the rest, but if I had done that I could not have lived with myself.

‘I never had much feeling for Luke,’ he said.

‘Then you’re colder even than I thought you were.’

‘I had an example to warn me off the opposite,’ he said.

‘You didn’t need any warning.’

‘I admit that you’re a man of strong feeling,’ he said. ‘Of strong feeling for people, that is. I’ve had the example of how much harm that’s done.’

We were standing still, facing each other, at the corner where the street ran into Piccadilly; for a second an association struck me, it brought back the corner of that other street to which Sawbridge walked in a provincial town. Our voices rose and fell; sometimes the bitterest remark was a whisper, often I heard his voice and mine echo back across the wide road. We shouted in the pain, in the special outrage of a family quarrel, so much an outrage because one is naked to oneself.

Instead of the stretch of Piccadilly, empty except for the last taxis, the traffic lights blinking as we shouted, I might have been plunged back into the pain of some forgotten disaster in the dark little ‘front room’ of our childhood, with the dying laburnum outside the windows. Pain, outrage, the special insight of those who wish to hurt and who know the nerve to touch. In the accusations we made against each other, there was the outrage of those bitter reproaches which, when we were at our darkest, we made against ourselves.

He said that I had forgotten how to act. He said that I understood the people round me, and in the process let them carry me along. I had wasted my promise. I had been too self-indulgent — friends, personal relations, I had spent myself over them and now it was all no use .